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Category → Billionaires Can Kill Democracy

By Peter Le Force – Most regular people think of a million dollars as being quite a bit of money. And, therefore, they think of a billion dollars as being a lot of money, too — just quite a bit more than a million. But let me show you just how much more it is.

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For example: If you had a million dollars on January 1, and you decided to spend 100,000 dollars a day — pretty nice shopping spree for most of us — it would take you 10 days to spend that one million dollars. If you had a $1 billion dollars on January 1, however, and decided to spend $100,000 a day — it would take you 27 years and just under 5 months to spend a billion dollars. So when you hear about someone who is a billionaire — now you know that means he or she can spend $100,000 per day for over 27 years before they would go broke. And realistically, since they would be drawing interest on that billion or getting dividends off the stock it was invested in, it would take much longer than that. Three per cent interest on $1 billion dollars is $30 million dollars a year. So when you add 3% interest onto the original capital of $1 billion, then take away the approximately $36 million per year being spent at the rate of $100,000 per day — it will end up taking nearly 59 years to spend the billion dollars.

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So you see, once a guy becomes a billionaire, he can spend $100,000 per day on political candidates of his choice — and it will take him over 59 years to spend all of the money. Does that make anyone feel better about the marginal tax rate on the rich — and the prospect of our children and grandchildren enjoying life in a country that is a democracy.

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Imagine if four or five rich guys with — oh, let’s say $5 billion dollars each — decide they are tired of buying race horses and decide they want to buy politicians as a sport — and a business. Someone with $5 billion dollars could spend $500, 000 dollars a day for 59 years before running out of money. They may run out of countries with crooked politicians to corrupt in that amount of time.